Doing fieldwork in china

Edited by Maria Heimer and Stig Thøgersen

This book is essential reading for graduate students planning fieldwork
in China. It brings out in the open information usually shared informally,
and has lessons for students about theory, methods, and about China in
these very personal cases. – Joseph Bosco, Asian Anthropology, 6 (2007)
Even though not written in the step-by-step format to chart the course of
fieldwork planning and execution, this book contains first person narratives that provide the kind of immediacy not readily available in other
standard textbooks. – Shu-min Huang, in Chinese Studies, 25:1 (2007)
This is not a nuts-and-bolts manual, but it is more than just a set of stories
from the field. Here are some sobering and helpful accounts of how other
anthropologists have struggled, sometimes succeeding and sometimes
failing … to carry out the research they envisioned from home. – Susan D.
Blum, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16:3, 2010

Cover illustration courtesy of Morten Laugesen.

Doing fieldwork inside the PRC is an eye-opening but sometimes
also deeply frustrating experience. Fieldwork-based studies form the
foundation for our understanding of Chinese politics and society,
but there are conspicuously few detailed descriptions in the China
literature of how people actually do their fieldwork, and of the
problems they encounter. This lack of public methodological debate
not only undermines academic standards of openness: it also stalls
constructive discussion on coping strategies to shared problems,
and it leaves graduate students going to the field for the first time
with a feeling of being the only ones to encounter difficulties.
In this volume scholars from around the world reflect on their
own fieldwork practice in order to give practical advice and discuss
more general theoretical points. The contributors come from a wide
range of disciplines such as political science, anthropology, economics, media studies, history, cultural geography, and sinology.

The book also contains an extensive bibliography.
This work is of relevance to postgraduate students from the
social sciences and humanities who plan to do fieldwork in China;
to experienced scholars who are new to the China field; and to experienced China scholars with an interest in methodological issues.

Heimer and Thøgersen DOING FIELDWORK IN CHINA

DOING FIELDWORK IN CHINA

Doing
FIELDWORK
IN CHINA

Edited by

Maria Heimer
and

Stig Thøgersen

www.niaspress.dk

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doing fieldwork in China

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doing fieldwork in china
Edited by

Maria Heimer and Stig Thøgersen

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First published in 2006
by NIAS Press
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
Leifsgade 33, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
tel (+45) 3532 9501 • fax (+45) 3532 9549
email: • website: www.niaspress.dk
Simultaneously published in North America
by the University of Hawai‘i Press
© Maria Heimer and Stig Thøgersen 2006

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Doing fieldwork in China
1.Social sciences - Research - China 2.Humanities Research - China 3.Social sciences - Field work
4.Humanities - Field work
I.Heimer, Maria II. Thogersen, Stig
300.7’2’051
ISBN-10: 8791114977

Typeset by Thor Publishing
Produced by SRM Production Services Sdn Bhd
and printed in Malaysia

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contents
Preface vii
Contributors ix
1 Stig Thøgersen and Maria Heimer Introduction • 1
Section I: The Role of Fieldwork in the Research Process
2 Kevin J. O’Brien Discovery, Research (Re)design, and Theory Building • 27
3 Elin Sæther Fieldwork as Coping and Learning • 42
4 Maria Heimer Field Sites, Research Design and Type of Findings • 58
Section II: Official China and Beyond
5 Mette Halskov Hansen In the Footsteps of the Communist Party:
Dilemmas and Strategies • 81
6 Emily T. Yeh ‘An Open Lhasa Welcomes You’: Disciplining the Researcher
in Tibet • 96
7 Stig Thøgersen Beyond Official Chinese: Language Codes

and Strategies • 110
Section III: Data Collection
8 Björn Gustafsson and Li Shi Surveys – Three Ways to Obtain
Household Income Data • 129
9 Dorothy J. Solinger Interviewing Chinese People: From High-level
Officials to the Unemployed • 153
10 Baogang He Consultancy: A Different Gate to the Field • 168
11 Stig Thøgersen Approaching the Field through Written Sources • 189



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Section IV: Insiders and Outsiders
12 Bu Wei Looking for ‘the Insider’s Perspective’: Human Trafficking
in Sichuan • 209
13 Björn Kjellgren The Significance of Benevolence and Wisdom –
Reflections on Field Positionality • 225
14 Mette Thunø In the ‘Field’ Together: Potentials and Pitfalls
in Collaborative Research • 245
15 Marina Svensson Ethical Dilemmas: Balancing Distance
with Involvement • 262
Appendices

Anja Møller Rasmussen, Inga-Lill Blomkvist and Mads Kjeldsen
An Annotated Bibliography • 283



Chinese Glossary • 309

Index • 313
Table
8.1 A partial survey of researcher-initiated surveys on households
in China used by articles published in academic journals 1997–2003 • 131



vi

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preface
This book grew out of the workshop ‘Fieldwork Methodology and Practice in China’
held in Copenhagen, 2–3 October 2003. The workshop papers were later substantially
rewritten, and we solicited additional chapters to cover aspects that we found important.
We would like to thank the participants in the workshop who all contributed to an open
and constructive discussion, and in particular Jørgen Delman and Cecilia Milwertz who
organized it together with us. The Danish Social Sciences Research Council and the
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) generously sponsored the workshop.

We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to Leena Höskuldsson,
Gerald Jackson and Janice Leon of NIAS Press for many constructive inputs during the
editorial process.

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contributors
Bu Wei is professor in the Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on feminist communication studies, adoption,
use and impact of media, empowering vulnerable groups through communication,
alternative media, social advocacy by NGOs, and ICT gaps in China.
Björn Gustafsson received his PhD in economics and is professor at the Department
of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has done research on income
distribution, poverty, international migration and social policy, concentrating first on
Sweden. For the last decade he has been involved in similar research on China together
with Chinese colleagues with whom he has published many research articles in scientific
journals in Chinese and English.
Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of Chinese studies at the University of Oslo. She has
done fieldwork-based research on minority education, ethnic relations, Han migrations to
minority areas and, most recently, individualisation processes in rural China. Her main

publications include Frontier People: Han Settlers in Minority Areas of China (University
of British Columbia Press, 2005) and Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Education and
Ethnic Identity in Southwest China (University of Washington Press, 1999).
Baogang He is professor and Chair of International Studies, The School of International
and Political Studies, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of
the editorial board of New Political Science, China: An International Journal, Political
Science Forum, and Rural Studies. He is presently engaged in studies of village elections,
democratization, and deliberative democracy. Dr. He is the author of four books and has
published 23 book chapters and more than 30 articles in English.
Maria Heimer (formerly Edin) is assistant professor in the Department of Government,
Uppsala University and affiliated with the Swedish School for Advanced Asia Pacific
Studies (SSAAPS). Her research interests focus on local governance, state capacity,
political change, and rising poverty and inequality. She currently works on the
implementation of poverty reduction policies, and the threat that social instability poses
to the Chinese leadership. Recent publications include the chapter ‘Taking an Aspirin:
Implementing Fee and Tax Reforms at the Grassroots’ in a book volume edited by
Elizabeth Perry and Merle Goldman to be published by Harvard University Press.

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Doing Fieldwork in China

Björn Kjellgren is a researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm
University, and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Culture and Language at the Royal Institute
of Technology, Stockholm. His research interests range from Chinese food and food

culture to social psychology and movements for indigenised social sciences. He is
currently conducting a study of filiality, xiao, as theory and practice in contemporary
China.
Li Shi is professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beijing Normal
University. He was a professor and senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 1996 to 2002. His current studies focus
on income distribution, poverty and rural migration in China. He has published in
journals such as Journal of Population Economics, Review of Income and Wealth, Economic
Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Economics, and Jingji Yanjiu
(Chinese).
Kevin J. O’Brien is Bedford professor of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley.  His research focuses on popular protest and Chinese politics in the reform
era.  He is the author of Reform without Liberalization: China’s National People’s Congress
and the Politics of Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 1990), co-author of
Rightful Resistance: Contentious Politics in Rural China (Cambridge, 2006), and the coeditor of Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford
University Press, 2005).  Currently, he is serving as the Chair of the Center of Chinese
Studies at UC-Berkeley.
Dorothy J. Solinger is professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Center
for Asian Studies, the University of California, Irvine; and Adjunct Senior Research
Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Her current
research is a comparative study of joining international economic organizations and
massive unemployment in China, France, and Mexico, 1980-2005. Her most recent
publications are Contesting Citizenship in Urban China, and, as co-editor, States and
Sovereignty in the Global Economy.
Marina Svensson is associate professor at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian
Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on social and political changes
in China, legal justice, media and the law, human rights, and cultural heritage issues
and contestations. She is the author of Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual
and Political History (Rowman & Littlefield 2002) and co-editor of The Chinese Human
Rights Reader (M.E. Sharpe 2001)

Elin Sæther is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Her dissertation is focused on the political role of Chinese media and the development
of critical journalism in China.



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Contributors

Mette Thunø is associate professor at the Department of Chinese Studies, University
of Copenhagen. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in China and among Chinese
migrants in Europe. She is the author of numerous studies on Chinese migration,
including articles in The China Quarterly and International Migration Review. She is the
co-author of Transnational Chinese: Fujianese Migrants in Europe (Stanford University
Press, 2004) and the editor of Beyond Chinatown: New Chinese Migrants and China’s
Global Expansion (NIAS Press, 2005).
Stig Thøgersen is professor at the East Asian Department, Institute of History and Area
Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published several books and articles on
Chinese modern history, education, and rural communities. His most recent book is
A County of Culture. Twentieth Century China Seen From the Village Schools of Zouping,
Shandong, University of Michigan Press, 2002. He is presently studying social, cultural,
and political change in rural China through fieldwork in Yunnan and Shandong.
Emily T. Yeh is an assistant professor of Geography at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. Her research focuses on environmental politics and development in Tibetan
areas of China. She is currently working on a manuscript about development, migration,
and land use change in the TAR. Other projects have included studies of conflicts

over natural resources and nature reserves, and the cultural politics of identity in the
Tibetan diaspora. Recent publications can be found in China Quarterly, Pacific Affairs,
Development and Change, and Conservation and Society.

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION
Stig Thøgersen and Maria Heimer
Doing fieldwork inside the People’s Republic of China is an eye-opening but
sometimes also deeply frustrating experience. Fieldwork-based studies form the
foundation for our understanding of Chinese politics and society, but there are
few detailed descriptions in the China literature of how people actually do their
fieldwork, and of the problems they encounter. In the best of cases, difficulties
are brought up in the methodology section of a book or in an appendix, but
more often they are stuck away in a footnote only to be quickly dismissed as
insignificant. It often looks like this (a fictive example):
This study uses both documentary and interview sources. The author visited
China on several occasions (1994, 1995, 1997 and 2001) and interviewed officials,

workers and Chinese scholars. Interviews have provided valuable material for
this study and I was surprised at the frankness with which interviewees described
the situation. Minor problems were encountered in the collection of data but I
judge they have not influenced the main findings of the project.1

This tendency is in no way restricted to the China field. As Lareau and Shultz
(1996: 2) point out:
There is always a gap between instruction and implementation, but this pattern
of success and regret has been traditionally private. Though often acknowledging
briefly that there were some aspects of the project that did not proceed as
anticipated, researchers – including those who use field research techniques –
often skimmed across and minimized the inevitable difficulties in the field.



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Doing Fieldwork in China

One reason for glossing over problems encountered in fieldwork is no doubt a
fear that the validity of our entire research will be jeopardized if we go public
with those deviations from ideal methodological standards we are forced to
make in the field. The resulting lack of public debate on fieldwork problems
does, however, not only undermine academic standards of openness, it also stalls
constructive discussion on coping strategies for shared problems, and it leaves
graduate students going to the field for the first time with a feeling of being the
only ones to encounter difficulties. Many have probably experienced the same

misery at the beginning of a PhD project that Elin Sæther captures so well in her
chapter. Minimal public information on the organization of fieldwork can add
to the misery. For example, one of the editors (Heimer) felt inadequate when she
engaged a Chinese student to take notes and to help out with interpretation at
times during her first visits to China, only to discover later that practically nobody
in the field worked without such assistance. The absence of such information in a
public form hides how dependent foreign scholars actually are on local assistance
and it blurs the picture of how fieldwork is carried out. Collective problems are,
totally unnecessarily in our opinion, turned into individual ones.
Exchanging experiences would help us all, graduate students and experienced
researchers alike, to make better compromises between ideal methodology and
actual practice. To publicly debate difficulties in fieldwork – which we in this
context shall define very broadly as going to the People’s Republic of China to
collect information – would be conducive to the credibility of researchers and the
quality of projects in the long term, and it would help to create a greater awareness of
how fieldwork shapes our findings and, ultimately, our understanding of China.

Aims of the book

This book has two main aims: to provide a frame of reference for students and
scholars who are new to China, and to provoke a public discussion among scholars
in the China field on the problems we encounter in fieldwork, on possible coping
strategies, and on how fieldwork methods affect our understanding of China.
The individual authors give their personal accounts of how fieldwork actually
gets done, along with reflections on how their experiences are linked up with
more general questions around fieldwork methodology and findings.
We find available books on methodology and fieldwork wanting in these
respects. Advice from general textbooks on methodology, to begin with, is of
course invaluable to have at the back of one’s mind, but this luggage is often of


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Introduction

limited help when faced with realities in the field.2 Instead of offering general
advice, the contributors to this volume discuss their practice in the field, how they
have coped with different types of problems, and how they have made acceptable
(or sometimes unacceptable) compromises between methodological rules and
reality. Also the more practical fieldwork handbooks are often overly general
in their expositions. It is easy to agree that you should establish rapport with
your main informants, or that you should write up field notes the same evening,
but we want to move beyond such general advice. The readers should therefore
neither expect a general methodology handbook or a guide on how to apply for a
research visa or other practical matters.3 The contributors’ personal accounts do
have more general relevance for fieldwork methods, but their broader points and
generalizations grow out of their personal experiences.
It is our aspiration that the book will be of help to graduate students who
plan to conduct fieldwork in China, particularly – but certainly not only – those
who do not have a senior adviser in the China field to teach them the tricks
of the trade. Another intended readership is researchers with experience from
other regions who plan to incorporate China in their research. But above all we
hope to engage experienced China scholars in reflections and debate on fieldwork
methodology. Such discussions are relevant for all disciplines in the social sciences
and humanities. Unlike many other books on fieldwork, the contributors to this
volume are not exclusively anthropologists but also come from media studies,
history, geography, economy, sinology, and political science. The reader will

find many interesting reflections from the anthropological point of view in a
recent volume edited by Xin Liu (2004) with contributions from a large group of
prominent China anthropologists. Our approach is different, however, because
we focus exclusively on doing fieldwork and on fieldwork methods.4
We believe that these characteristics also make this volume useful as a
textbook in more general courses on fieldwork methodology. The fact that we
concentrate exclusively on fieldwork in China does not mean that we regard
the problems as being unique to the PRC. On the contrary, many of them are
common across countries, and given the fact that limited access is a problem
in many countries, China fieldworkers with their long experience with various
coping strategies should be able to contribute to ongoing discussions on
general fieldwork methods. Our point of departure is that although fieldwork
in the PRC is subject to many political restrictions the fundamental issues are
universal. Compromises always have to be made between methodological rules
and the actual reality in the field – whether carrying out a local community
study in Sweden or writing an ethnography on religious rituals in Zimbabwe


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Doing Fieldwork in China

– and the choices we make in the process always need to be highlighted and
discussed. At the same time, in order for the discussion on fieldwork methods to
be meaningful it should focus on concrete examples. China is unique, and so are
all other places. Each country – or situation to be more precise – presents its own
specific conditions and difficulties and calls for different solutions and coping

strategies. De Soto and Dudwick (2000: 3), for example, argue for the specificity
of the fieldwork dilemmas that post-socialist societies raise for the ethnographer,
and Bestor, Steinhoff and Bestor (2003) present a number of personal narratives
on fieldwork in Japan. For China, Anne Thurston and Burton Pasternak (1983)
summed up experiences from the early 1980s when opportunities to do fieldwork
in mainland China had just opened up. Much has happened since then, however,
and we feel it is high time for an update.
At the same time, this book is also an argument for what we see as the most
fruitful approach to fieldwork: to stay open to unexpected empirical findings in the
field and to allow for a redesign of the project. This approach lies implicitly behind
most of the papers, but it is presented most forcefully in Kevin O’Brien’s opening
chapter, where he argues that some of the most interesting findings emerge exactly
when our entire conceptualization of ‘the problem’ is reshaped in the process of
fieldwork.
The specific context of doing fieldwork in China changes over time. We will
begin with an exposition of the history of Western fieldwork in China up to the
early 1990s in order to contextualize the fieldwork experiences of the contributors
to this volume, who mainly discuss the period from 1990 onwards. This historical
outline will lead up to a discussion of what we see as the most important general
themes in the authors’ accounts.

Western fieldwork in China up to the 1990s
A good way to see what is happening in a building would be to take its roof off,
could that be done without disturbing its inmates. If we wish to comprehend the
Chinese, we must take the roof from their homes, in order to learn what is going
on within. This no foreigner can do. But he can imitate the Chinese who apply a
wet finger to a paper window, so that when the digit is withdrawn there remains
a tiny hole, through which an observant eye may see at least something. (Arthur
H. Smith 1899: 16–17).

When Arthur H. Smith wrote these lines in his Village Life in China he had been
a missionary in China for more than 25 years. The subtitle of his book, A Study


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Introduction

in Sociology, shows how the observant eye peeking through the paper window was
affected by the dawning social sciences, and in this sense Smith’s works, which
also include the even more popular Chinese Characteristics (1894), are among the
earliest, and certainly among the most influential, Western studies of China that
can be said to build on fieldwork as a conscious methodological approach. They
clearly bear the imprint of a time when racial stereotypes and generalizations were
standard elements in social science discourse, but at the same time they reflect
an intimate knowledge of Chinese society gained from the several decades Smith
lived and worked in the country. When we compare the scope of his experience
to the short-term visits under official supervision that post-1949 researchers have
often had to settle for, his modest talk of a ‘tiny hole’ through which to observe
Chinese everyday life becomes almost overwhelmingly ironic.5
The ideal image of the social scientist observing China ‘without disturbing its
inmates’ fitted the scientific norms that had been established by the prestigious
natural sciences, but it was, in fact, very far from the actual practice of Arthur
H. Smith and other Western social scientists. Smith was clearly missionary first
and social scientist second, and the aim of his social investigation was to find a
way to convert the Chinese to Christianity. ‘There are in China many questions
and problems,’ wrote Smith in his conclusion, ‘but the one great question, the

sole all-comprehending problem is how to set Christianity at work upon them,
which alone in time can and will solve them all’ (Smith 1899: 352). In the
1910s and 1920s, Western missionaries continued to ponder this great question,
and some turned to the tools of the quickly developing social sciences in order
to bring about fundamental social and spiritual change. In its early years,
sociology as an academic discipline in China was almost completely dominated
by American missionaries (Wong 1979: 11–19). John S. Burgess, the first head
of the Sociology Department at Yenching University, and Sidney D. Gamble
who ran his own institute for social research in Beijing were both associated
with the YMCA, and they were also among the most influential pioneers of
quantitative social surveys. In a large-scale investigation of living conditions
in Beijing they collected empirical data with the triple purpose of forming the
foundation for Christian social work, making Chinese students aware of the
acute social problems of their own society, and developing ‘a social program that
will influence the life of Peking and all of China’ (Gamble 1921: 26).
Gamble later did a comprehensive rural study in Ding county, Hebei
province (Gamble 1954). The material for this study was collected between
1926 and 1933 when Ding county was one of the main centers for the Rural
Reconstruction Movement that tried to reform China’s villages through social


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Doing Fieldwork in China

experiments in designated areas. One of the leading figures of this movement,
James Yen (Yan Yangchu) praised Gamble’s report for having ‘contributed more

than any other single factor to a scientific approach to the social and economic
problems of the Chinese peasants’ (Gamble 1954: ix). John Lossing Buck’s (1968
[1937]) monumental study of land utilization based on data from almost 17,000
farms and 40,000 farm families also counts among the major contributions of
survey research to an understanding of the economy of rural China. The American
missionaries were very explicit about the close link between social studies and social
reform, and some Chinese debaters accused their work of being more propaganda
than social science. However, Chinese scholars and social reformers soon adopted
the survey methodology with great enthusiasm and it is estimated that around
1,000 social surveys were conducted each year between 1927 and 1935 (Wong
1979: 16–17).
Not all foreign social scientists saw it as their mission to convert the Chinese
or reform Chinese society. The Russian anthropologist Sergei M. Shirokogoroff,
for example, who at Qinghua University became the teacher of China’s most
famous anthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotong was a specialist on the Tungus
and apparently did most of his fieldwork in China proper on anthropometrics,
meticulously measuring the bodies and skulls of the Chinese he came across
in order to identify the physical characteristics of the East Asian ethnic groups
(Arkush 1981: 39; Guldin 1994: 44–46). However, to most researchers social
investigation and social reform were intimately connected, and the very process
of establishing sociology and anthropology as academic disciplines in China ran
parallel to the development of social work.6
While foreigners dominated the early years of survey research in China,
community studies – the other popular fieldwork methodology in the pre-1949 era
– were mostly carried out by ethnic Chinese who had either been trained abroad or
by Western teachers in China. There were exceptions, such as the American Daniel
H. Kulp II (1925) whose study of a Guangdong village was a pioneering work in the
field of rural sociology (Wong 1979: 28), but even when we look at publications in
English the most influential anthropological and/or sociological studies of China’s
pre-1949 rural communities were works by native Chinese scholars such as Peasant

Life in China by Fei Xiaotong (1939), Under the Ancestors’ Shadow by Francis L.
K. Hsu (1948), and A Chinese Village by Martin C. Yang (1948). In his preface
to Peasant Life in China Bronislaw Malinowski particularly emphasized that this
work was ‘not written by an outsider looking out for exotic impression from a
strange land; it contains observations carried on by a citizen upon his own people’
(Fei 1939: xix).


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Introduction

Fieldwork during the Mao era
When the CCP took power in 1949 it meant an almost immediate stop to
fieldwork-based research in mainland China. C. K. Yang who since 1948 had
been conducting a village study near Guangzhou with some of his students was
allowed to continue until 1951. When he left for Hong Kong, however, he was
forced to leave all written materials behind and later had to reproduce the data
from memory. His book gives a first-hand account of the land reform, but (very
illustrative of the general situation) all information on the fate of the village
after 1951 had to be ‘gleaned from the Communist and non-Communist press’
(Yang 1959: vii). Sociology departments in Chinese universities were closed in
1952 (Wong 1979: 43), and over the next 30 years only a handful of foreigners
could do anything that even resembled fieldwork. Isabel and David Crook
(1959, 1966) and William Hinton (1967, 1983) who had won the trust of the
Communist leadership before 1949 were allowed to do follow-up studies in ‘their’
villages in 1959/1960 and 1971 respectively, and Swedish journalist and writer

Jan Myrdal (1965, 1984) produced influential books based on interviews he did
with peasants near Yan’an in Shaanxi province in 1962 and 1969. Except for such
trusted ‘friends of China’, however, the door was firmly closed on foreign social
scientists. When limited cultural and academic exchange with the West was reestablished in the early 1970s, some scholars were granted three-week guided
tours to carefully selected institutions (Kessen 1975), but this was a very meager
substitute for the real thing.
Effectively barred from doing meaningful research within the PRC, foreign
social scientists, particularly sociologists and political scientists, turned to
refugees and emigrants in Hong Kong as a substitute. In the 1950s there were
still few PRC immigrants in the crown colony and hardly any researchers who
paid attention to them. Already in the early 1960s, however, there were enough
relevant informants among the Hong Kong refugees to enable A. Doak Barnett
(1964) and Ezra Vogel (1969) to write substantial, partly interview-based studies
of what was going on in New China, and from the mid-seventies legal PRC
emigrants poured into Hong Kong in such numbers that by 1984 one tenth of
Hong Kong’s population had emigrated from the mainland since 1978 (Walder
1986: 260). This opened new possibilities for designing large-scale interviewing
projects with informants who had recent and personal experience with practically
all aspects of social life in China, and the Universities Service Centre for China
Studies in Hong Kong became the academic base for scores of researchers on
longer or shorter stays.7


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Doing Fieldwork in China

For several years works based on emigrant interviews gave deeper insights
into the way the basic cells of Mao’s China worked than any other methodology,
regardless of whether we look at villages (Parish and Whyte 1978; Chan, Madsen
and Unger 1984, Madsen 1984), urban communities (Whyte and Parish 1984),
industrial enterprises (Walder 1986), schools (Unger 1982, Shirk 1982), Red
Guards (Rosen 1982), or political activism (Chan 1985).
It is striking that the methodological discussion in many of the works based
on emigrant interviews is much more detailed than what we generally find in
later works coming out of fieldwork in the PRC. The scholars working in Hong
Kong evidently found it necessary to defend their method against accusations
of bias and lack of representativity.8 They admitted that their data had certain
problems, but claimed that they could be overcome by asking the right questions
to the right people. ‘It would be a mistake to assume that most refugees are bitter
anticommunists’, wrote Parish and Whyte (1978: 345), and went on to describe
a number of procedures they used to detect and correct this and other possible
problems during interviewing and data analysis. In the 1980s, when most of the
books based on emigrant interviews were published, the PRC was opening up
to foreign researchers, and it could be claimed that going to China would be a
better way to create an authentic picture of what the country was really like. As
Jonathan Unger pointed out in 1987, however, the PRC authorities still placed
numerous constraints on foreign researchers. In Unger’s view Hong Kong at that
time still offered several advantages:
There is no need to secure the official sponsorship of an organization inside
China in order to begin one’s work; no pre-selection by government authorities
of research sites; and no pre- or post-research censorship on topics and questions.
Moreover, interviews in Hong Kong can be conducted in a manner that is
normal to most social science research: that is, in a manner that safeguards the
confidentiality and anonymity of respondents (Unger 1987: 28–29).

The Hong Kong based studies have certainly stood the test of time, and it

would be difficult to point to issues where later research conducted in the mainland
substantially revised their findings on pre-reform China. As things eased up in
China, however, most sociologists and political scientists preferred to make their
own observations there, and Hong Kong lost its importance as a substitute field
site.
The anthropologists were in a different situation because interviews with
emigrants from many different localities could not replace the close observations


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Introduction

of small communities which most of them preferred. Some anthropologists did
use Hong Kong as their field site, however, but they studied villages in the New
Territories rather than emigrants. Others worked in Taiwan or with overseas
Chinese, particularly in Southeast Asia. In an interesting commentary senior
British anthropologist Maurice Freedman chose to see the advantages of the new
situation. He felt that the continued piling up of samples of local communities
that characterized pre-1949 research would have brought little new understanding
of the larger issues, while the ‘new experiences in the study of Chinese society
outside mainland China have taught new lessons’ (Freedman 1979: 383). Inside
the PRC, large-scale anthropological fieldwork was carried out by Chinese
researchers in the 1950s in connection with the classification of China’s ethnic
minorities, their languages, and their social history (Guldin 1994: 105–144),
but Western anthropologists, like all other social scientists, were banned from
the mainland.

New openings – new restrictions
Between 1979 and early 1981 Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘opening up’ to the
outside world gave foreign researchers opportunities for doing fieldwork for
the first time in 30 years. China’s post-Mao rulers wanted to promote contacts
with the West, not least in the fields of science, technology, and education, and,
somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the social sciences and humanities were not
excluded from the ‘scientific’ company. In early 1979, the first group of seven
US scholars went to China for long-term study and research supported by the
Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China
(Thurston 1983: 5), and around the same time other countries and universities
all over the world set up exchange programs with Chinese counterparts. Anne
Thurston describes the atmosphere among US China scholars during this early
phase as ‘enthusiasm that sometimes bordered on euphoria’. Not only were they
let in, they were even allowed to stay for long periods of time in rural villages.
A revival of the community studies of the Republican era seemed to be within
reach.
The euphoria did not last long, however. A US graduate student who did
fieldwork in rural Guangdong from 1979 ran into troubles with the Chinese
authorities (and with his own university), and the conflicts triggered a Chinese
moratorium publicized in early 1981 on long-term fieldwork by foreigners
(Thurston 1983; Pieke 1987). The situation never returned to the complete
ban of Mao’s days, however. Visits of shorter duration remained possible, and


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Doing Fieldwork in China

alternative research designs compensated for the loss of opportunities for longterm participant observation. One of the most prominent examples was the
Shandong Field Research Project in Zouping (1988–93), where a group of US
scholars over a period of several years worked on different projects inside the
same county (Walder 1998).
During the 1980s foreign scholars were testing the limits of the new rules
governing their fieldwork, and the uncertainty about what it was possible to do
was evident on both sides. A personal example may illustrate this. In 1984 one
of the editors (Thøgersen) was based at Beijing Normal University preparing a
thesis on secondary education reform, and as part of this project the university
organized a field trip to Yantai, Shandong. Part of the plan was to do a survey
on the social background of students in different types of middle schools, and
the questionnaire to the students included questions on their parents’ job, education, income, and Party membership. The whole questionnaire had been cleared
with the Ministry of Education in Beijing, and the authorities in Yantai had
no objections to it either. When I was leaving China, however, the custom
authorities would not let me take the questionnaires out of the country because
they regarded the information on Party membership as too sensitive. I had to
leave without the questionnaires, and without much hope of ever seeing them
again. After I had left, a Chinese friend solved the problem by erasing all answers
to the ‘illegal’ question by hand – in 700 questionnaires – under the supervision
of a custom officer (Thøgersen 1990: 132–53). It was also quite normal in the
1980s that local cadres would tell you that they could not photocopy articles
from ‘internal’ (neibu) journals or books for you, but they were willing to leave
them in your room for a few days and give you the address of a private shop with
a photocopy machine.
As these examples show, most rules were open to local interpretation and
therefore negotiable, but negotiations were often cumbersome and tended to
absorb much time and mental energy on both sides (for examples see Pieke 1996:
4–16; Wolf 1985: 28–55). Could you freely choose a field site? Would it be possible
to do your own selection of interviewees, and could you talk to them without the

presence of officials? Which documents and publications would be accessible?
Such questions could lead to lengthy discussions between foreign researchers
and Chinese officials, often with the foreigner’s Chinese academic counterpart
caught somewhere in the middle desperately trying to make the foreigner understand Chinese rules and make the cadres concede to international criteria for
academic work. The possibilities for doing fruitful fieldwork existed, but the
many uncertainties made it so dangerous to base one’s research plans primarily
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on interviews and participant observation that Elisabeth Croll suggested that we
should think of fieldwork as ‘the icing on a very substantial cake of documentary
work which can stand on its own if, for some reason, the field work investigation
does not eventuate or materialize in the anticipated form’ (Croll 1987: 18).
Official control over data collection and a general lack of autonomy were the
overriding problems, and in order to solve them many researchers resorted to variations of what Thomas Gold called ‘guerrilla interviewing’, which he defined as
‘unchaperoned, spontaneous but structured participant observation and interviews
as opportunities present themselves’ (Gold 1989: 180). Gold went to market
places, rode taxis, and had his hair cut, and he used these opportunities to strike
up conversations with private shopkeepers and entrepreneurs in an attempt to get
those vivid ethnographic details and uncensored personal opinions that official
media and supervised interviews did not provide. It is evident that foreigners in the
1980s learned much about China simply from being there over extended periods
of time and talking to people they met. When someone asks you for the tenth time
which work unit you belong to, you realize that work units are important elements

of Chinese urban social structure, even if your research topic happens to be something completely different. In this sense the sudden opening up after decades
of isolation together with the unpredictability of Chinese bureaucratic control
contributed to developing a research style characterized by the opportunistic and
unforeseen rather than the carefully planned. Many projects were pushed in new
directions by sudden discoveries or unexpected barriers.
The violent suppression of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in June 1989
was, in some ways, a watershed in the history of Western fieldwork in China. A
considerable number of Western researchers were eyewitnesses to the dramatic
events in Beijing and reports on the demonstrations in the provinces show how
foreign scholars by this time had spread far beyond the capital (Unger 1991).
Immediately after June 4th the prospect for future fieldwork looked grim. The
large majority in the academic communities in Europe and North America turned
away from the Chinese regime in disgust, and some recommended a boycott or
at least a moratorium on official academic cooperation. On the Chinese side the
State Education Commission issued a directive prohibiting Chinese universities
from collaborating with foreign researchers, and foreign social scientists were
monitored particularly closely (Brady 2003: 234).
The setback turned out to be temporary, however. Chinese academics
were desperate at the thought of being isolated once again and did their best
to maintain their international contacts, and few foreign social scientists could
see any perspective in long-term sanctions in the academic field. After Deng
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Xiaoping’s ‘Southern Tour’ in 1992 the climate again became more favorable
for international contacts. The number of foreign business people and other
permanent residents in China grew dramatically, and so did the number of
foreign researchers and students, academic exchange programs, and collaborative
projects. This trend has continued ever since.

Doing fieldwork in China in the 1990s
and onwards: three themes

Since the early 1990s fieldwork in China has become more multifaceted and
diverse. Each contribution to this volume discusses a particular dimension of
fieldwork in more detail, and here we shall only highlight three important themes
that come back again and again in the chapters: the overriding presence of the
party-state; limited access to the field; and collaboration with Chinese academic
partners and assistants. These issues loom large among the problems that call for
coping strategies.
The presence of the party-state
Perhaps the largest challenge is the dominant presence of the party-state, or,
to borrow from the title of Mette Halskov Hansen’s chapter, the fact that
fieldworkers are ‘walking in the footsteps of the Chinese Communist Party’.
There are two main aspects of this issue: direct political-ideological control, and
the more intangible influence of the dominant Party discourse.
In spite of a more open atmosphere in China some topics are still, in the eyes
of the Party, too politically sensitive to do research on, and some conclusions too
sensitive to draw, as Emily Yeh’s chapter on her research in Tibet clearly shows.
This can lead to problems with data collection, but may also – and more seriously
– have unfortunate consequences for the informants. Although the political
climate in Tibet is not representative for China as a whole, the underlying logic
that Yeh describes is present, more or less, in all fieldwork, although it may lead
to nothing more than that we prefer to keep an informant anonymous or keep

secret the precise location of a field site. One dilemma for all involved is that the
limits for what sort of information foreigners (and Chinese academics for that
sake) are supposed to get access to are not clearly defined. It is revealing that Hu,
the local cadre in Yeh’s paper, has no idea about what constitutes a politically
sensitive issue and what could potentially get him into trouble. This is often
decided ex post facto, depending on the political climate and the political effects
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